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So now we can place objects, effects, and make dialogs! Next up: NPCs

I have about 10 prototype games in the making, and lots of other ideas spread out in my top secret Idea Notebooks and nerdy voice recordings I make to myself while on the commute back and forth to work.  I haven’t been able to decide which to make though!

SpinCycle was a lot of fun to make, and barely took any time- which is fantastic.  Simple ideas like that are hard to come by though, and my free time is extremely limited these days, mostly nonexistent when working 2 jobs and dealing with a ridiculous commute. So I get plenty of time to design but not much time to code.

First I need to finish up BigFish, which is a Facebook 3D fishing game I am creating with a business partner. I gave it a whirl on the iPad and it looks fantastic, so I will most likely port it to iPad once it’s done on Facebook.

Of all the games I’ve made for iPhone so far, CastleGuard2 has had the biggest success and following, indeed I still get emails and sales on it almost every day. So I am pretty sure an update for that game would be a good business decision too.

Arcana: Spell Duel is my personal favorite game, but did very poorly in terms of sales and feedback, and took the longest to build. I did come away from that project with a fantastic dynamic spell effect system though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

DangerLands is an enormous project, and I have a good crew still on tap to work on it, but it’s been hard for me to get back into it. Still, of all the projects I want to spend time on, RPGs seem to call me home the most.  There are a couple technical hurdles that are stopping me from getting back full force into DangerLands though, and if I am going to jump in I need to work out a theoretical solution first.

The first issue is server networking. I love working with Shiva very much, but it doesn’t yet have a scriptable server. This means I have to use a specialized client to act as a server, and optimize it. Ideally I would have a fault-tolerant client/server, so that instances are hosted by players. The big issue with this is making it work nicely when the controlling player leaves the game. Pocket Legends seems to do this very well, and I should study/observe it more to understand what’s going on.  It’s important to incorporate into the architecture early on, but hard to do it in a neat and clean way.  I had begun to do something like this with DangerLands, but that kind of tech takes a while to get right.

The real hairy ones are the networked objects. Scene geometry and even character data can be hosted on the other clients, straight from the server.  Yes, that can be a trouble area, but should be minimal on a relatively closed platform. Networked objects which need to think and maintain persistent state across clients are a different animal. It feels like I need to create some kind of centralized monster controller, so that monster states and current information/brain activity can be maintained on all clients. When the hosting server sends out information about a monster instruction (Bandersnatch is attacking Dave), all the other clients should tuck that away into their own inactive monster controllers. Then, if the hosting server should disconnect, the next client in line can start up their monster server and pick up where the departed hosting server left off. It sounds simple, but I know it will be complex.

The other hurdle is with multiplayer code. I had a foolish notion that I would run lots of players on maps, but it’s just not feasible. It seems much more practical to divide up into instanced areas like Pocket Legends does (and many others), and have some central ares for casual hanging out.  I would love to architect the entire game with only a single headless pass-through server, and spread out the server load to all the other clients.

So, step 1 for the continuance of DangerLands would be to get just type of flow working. I also aim to GREATLY simplify the character framework, and reduce the stats/skills to minimize the data being thrown around.

This kind of framework would let me work on some of the other game ideas I have in the future. We will stick with click-to-move/tap-to-move so I don’t have to finish up my dead-reckoning code either

Anyway, just a few random thoughts on what I want to do next.

I made a mistake of not including support for OS 3.1, and I will be rectifying that when I can. Otherwise it’s a WHOLE LOT of fun and is the simplest game I’ve ever made. It took a couple weekends to make. I’m particularly proud of this one because it is so simple and so fun, and the gameplay mechanic is one I came up with myself. I wanted to come up with something quick and simple to try out iAds and an Ad Supported game.  When I got it figured out, I released the xcode project to the Shiva community so fellow Shiva developers can also take advantage of iAds/adWhirl to monetize their apps.

Feedback is great so far, though no one can come close to my high scores

I will be getting to an update soon I hope, to clear up the help screen(s), simplify gameplay even more, and add a whole lot more POW! to the gameplay experience. Also will be putting out an Ad-free 0.99 version. Then I’ll market it a bit, I won’t spread the word much until I get those issues fixed.

Special shout out to Dede Sundberg, who came up with the awesome title.

This version is Ad Supported. Here are some screenies.

Grab it, let me know what you think!

A Fun Game

My good friend Montgomery Farrar Tidwell, who goes by the nickname ‘Cucumber’ is also a fellow Indie game developer. We both have been creating iPhone games for the last year or so. Him using Unity 3D / Objective C and me using the Shiva Game Engine.  We chat almost every day in the legacy MyDreamRPG IRC (irc.dreamgamesinc.com:16667), or http://www.mydreamrpg.com/irc for the last several years.

This year, Cucumber released a kid’s game called Balloon Fun. My 2 year old daughter Olivia loved it from the moment I showed it to her. The game is simple for her to use ‘all by herself’ as she likes to say, and she plays it for hours when she can get my iPhone away from me.

Here she is last Christmas:

I admit it, I would jump in front of a truck for this little girl. She’s a princess through and through and lights my heart up every day without fail.

Tragedy

Yesterday I drove up to work like most days, which is 2 hours away with traffic. I was there for only a few hours when I noticed my phone vibrating, and saw that I had several missed calls and a couple voicemails also. The dang iPhone vibrate button is on the blink so I missed them all, but managed to grab the latest call. It was my 14 yr old son Ramsay, who sounded panicky. “Dad, Shauna needs you to come home right now, we called 911 and Olivia is on the way to the hospital.”  Those kind of calls are always good for an immediate adrenaline rush, and of course I need to know more right NOW!! So I asked to speak to my wife, but she was in panic mode and couldn’t talk. I found out later she was holding my little girl in her arms, who was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth, so couldn’t talk anyway.  This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten a panic call to come home now (happens with the little ones), but never involved an ambulance.  So I left work somewhat angrily, another 2 hours in the car before me. I was thinking my wife was over-reacting.. but she wasn’t.

Morning

On the ride home I called home to talk to my son and get the details of what was going on.  My wife had taken all three kids out to breakfast (Ages 14, 2, 1) in the morning, and Olivia is usually a laughing, talking, dancing, singing whirlwind of a girl, but on that morning she was very very quiet. She didn’t eat her favorite breakfast foods at the Phoenix, and she even fell asleep on my wife’s lap. She said she didn’t feel good. On the way home my wife stopped to pick up some Children’s Tylenol because Olivia felt a little warm. While she was in the grocery store, Ramsay called me at work because Olivia wanted to talk to me. She told me she was scared and she didn’t feel good. I told her Mommy will take good care of her, and we hung up. An hour later she was in an ambulance being rushed to the Trauma ward at St. Luke’s Hospital.

When they got home from the grocery store, Olivia got out of the car but just stood still. She walked up to the top of the stairs and just stood there, staring ahead. Then she moved inside and was staring into space, not saying anything to anyone. Shauna put her in a bath and gave her some Tylenol, figuring she felt really sick. She is a bath maniac, but  today she just splashed around a little and then didn’t move around much. My wife has had some experience with seizures, and instinct told her this was going to get bad quickly. She had my son call 911 and an ambulance was on its way. Minutes after the bath my little girl collapsed and began to convulse. The paramedics came and took her to the Trauma ward, but not before she had 3-4 seizures, one of them over 6 minutes long. She was unresponsive with an extremely high fever.

Ride Home

I found this out at the beginning of the ride home and began to accelerate.  The ride takes on average 2 hours, I have done it safely in about 1 hour without traffic.  This ride was much faster than usual, I was praying nonstop, and even yelling at God to not take my daughter from me. I can’t describe my love for this little girl, it’s surpassing.

During the rest of the ride there were no more details or updates forthcoming.. I went straight to the ER.

This is what I saw there:

Waiting

She remained unresponsive for many hours in the Trauma unit, a couple times seeming like she was going to wake up but she didn’t. She sat by her side, holding her hand, talking to her, singing to her, praying.  She woke up and looked around once for a few seconds, then passed out again. We waited more, monitoring her vital signs and the beeping machines. This was an extremely nervewracking time. We didn’t know if she was hurt badly from her seizures, and if brain functions would be normal. We just wanted our little baby girl back.

After many hours, my wife and I decided to try to wake her up. I had my iPhone with me and I loaded up one of her favorite songs “Lonely Goatherd” from the Sound of Music soundtrack. She wasn’t responding at all, we began to get a little desperate but persisted. Then Olivia woke up and looked around. She kept on looking like she was going to pass out again, her eyes were rolling around and body moving strangely, but we managed to sit her up. Shauna reached over for a piece of chocolate chip cookie and I rubbed some on her lips so she could taste it and maybe be interested in it. She licked her lips a little and then smacked her mouth. She was acting very strangely now, almost like an infant.  We kept her awake while she nibbled on chocolate chip cookie, and we tried to get her to communicate. She was unresponsive to that, and didn’t seem to recognize us or smile. I tried showing her several pictures on the iPhone of family members she loves and she didn’t seem to recognize any, but she grabbed the phone and put it in her mouth to lick a piece of chocolate off it. My heart sank… this was something our 10 month old baby boy does. I felt that perhaps she had been damaged by the fever and seizures.

Then I got an idea.

I pulled out the iPhone again and cranked up Balloon Fun. It begins with a voice which says “Shake to Play”. When she heard the voice, she snapped her attention onto the phone and grabbed it from me, and began to tap balloons. The first one was clumsy but she then began tapping the correctly colored balloons in rapid succession. This was as sure a sign as any that her brain was functioning OK! My wife and I laughed with tears in our eyes and watched her play. After a minute or so, she fidgeted and tried to grab the IV out of her arm. “It hurts mama” She said. My wife and I broke down then, to hear our little angel speak again. She was going to be OK.

10 minutes after waking up

In the next several minutes she regained her natural state and was chatting, eating popsicles, chocolate milk, and cookies. We were happy to give them to her, and praised God for the gift of our daughter Olivia.

This story is the story of one heck of a dramatic day, and of the iPhone app Balloon Fun that allowed my little girl to re-orient herself from a comatose state. Who would’ve thought?

Thank you Cucumber my good friend. I know it hasn’t sold too many copies yet, but this one little user is your biggest fan.

If you’re reading this, chances are good that the new Apple iPad is not aimed at you, though you can get one if you want it! All the grumbling from folks about this missing feature or the price, or  “Why did I have to wait so long and why would I pay for just a large iPod Touch?”  The yawning, the jokes. You’re missing the point, and it’s because it’s not about you.

I predict the iPad to be a consumer household device for casual content consuming, gaming, communications, specific industry workflow- not at all aimed at the traditional pc/laptop market.   A family device that is hard to break, maintenance free, difficult to infect and looks sexy.  For people who don’t want to lug a laptop around in the living room/kitchen/bed, or folks on the job who flaunt a clipboard as a constant accessory.  For IT and customer service folks, it’s easy to support and extremely easy to learn to use.  It’s not for hardcore work at all, or with all of the ‘open ended’ uses that a computer has- though it will overlap in many ways.  “There’s an app for that” and if there isn’t, there will be.  For people at end-of-life for their current laptop or family computer, something new and sexy and probably as cheap as the replacement computer they were thinking about will seem like a good idea.  Apple marketing will take care of the rest.

In comparison, the iPad has very much the same broad market appeal that a Nintendo Wii has been successful with, yet with the overflowing App Store it seems tailored for a broader use than you would think. To arrive at and identify the potential market seems in retrospect, a no-brainer.  The surprising sales of eBook readers and iPods for application and gaming and the huge UNCAPITALIZED market of household casual computing is ripe for the picking.  Aside from households and private industry, there is also an enormous potential for government employee use, and broader military use.  The lack of moving parts and places for sand and dirt to get into is a fantastic reason to get these things… support costs in comparison to normal laptops and computers would be fantastically lower.  Though as my friend pointed out: a child dropping it would probably be a Bad Thing(tm) for the glass.

Right now everyone who is interested in or were scouring for news about the device are the existing laptop/desktop users who were left thinking “What do I need this for!”  Yet the ones who are already using their iPhone/iPod for communications/gaming/content consumption may very likely and instinctively want to get an iPad badly.  I certainly felt the yearning.  I am not a laptop fan at all though, I MUCH prefer a desktop.  The people who were expecting a laptop or netbook replacement out of the iPad are sorely disappointed now and scoffing, yelling “Fail!”. No camera? No Office Suite? No USB?  Well.. why would there be? These things were intentionally left out! Apple will continue to sell MacBooks and iMacs for those purposes, it probably doesn’t want to cannibalize its userbase.  Though it’s safe to say that brand loyalty and coolness factor will generate a substantial number of sales.  I’ve been a Mac Hater for.. 25 years!  Until I actually used one

I believe Apple will begin to market this device to the household consumer, and large (niche) industry- not the student, not the gamer yet, not the ‘computer user’ yet.  Then: sales forces, medical personnel, education.  For those of you who don’t ‘get it’ it, and I was certainly one who had major doubts about the iPad, we’re also the same folks who don’t really see why Facebook and Facebook games are so popular. We mock and scoff. Yet that doesn’t stop the millions of users, or the revenues.

As a content provider myself (I make games!) I am excited about the new device and its potential userbase, and what it will bring to casual gaming. I will make sure my iPhone/Facebook MMO DangerLands will look great on it, and I am very thankful for the additional device power. It effectively adds a new platform to cross-platform gaming without much extra effort on the part of the game developer. This is a GOOD thing

To sum up: Been Busy Coding!

DangerLands development has been going strong (with the natural exception of the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas slowdowns) and I’ve gutted the network code to move away from the click-to-move control style into a joypad/keyboard style movement by popular request. It sucks up a ton more network traffic, yes, but is very much worthwhile interms of movement precision and world immersion. It took a few weeks to do this one thing, and it still needs tuning, but it works!  In the process, I developed some really cool server architectures which enable us to fire up a DangerLands zone server on any network-enabled device.  This should let us run instances, let people build their own zones, and reduce our infrastructure costs dramatically.

I’ve been posting on some other places too lately (not blog persay) but lots of little updates about DangerLands over on the DangerLands site and on TouchArcade, where there is a lengthy thread about the game.  There is also a private messageboard we use for DangerLands dev with over 300 posts, but it’s private and lots of top secret confidential take-the-world-by-storm type stuff.

The DangerLands team has between 2 and 4 people on it, depending on what’s going on.  We’re all art-timers, and I am still doing all the development/coding.  I’m not doing world design, which is a good thing.  That’s being handled primarily by Winin, and he’s been posting some blogs about his experiences over on Multiplaying.net.

We recently announced that we are expanding the cross-platform nature of the game to include Facebook. It will probably end up being the primary platform for DangerLands in a casual gameplay sense if my hunch is correct.

So, this is really gearing up to be an awesome 2010!  And… I’ll try to post more

Though.. it’s not *just* iPhone. It’s more accurate to say that it’s a cross-platform MMO, but it FEATURES an iPhone client. Which makes it a front-runner in that arena anyway.  Here is the full post, which I broke on Touch Arcade:

This has been an exciting summer! A new baby for me, born on 9/11/09, and the release of my third solo game (Arcana: Spell Duel) on 9/12/09. I’m quite proud of both

It also marks the time when I decide to get a team together to work on a game that we’ve been wanting to make for a long time.  The timing is perfect. I’m between updates for Arcana and CastleGuard2. Working alone is great sometimes, but you really miss having some help when companies like Gameloft are cranking out really nice and well-polished titles.  My art skills are somewhere between non-existent and horrendous after all, and I’ve had a rough time getting by on my own. It’s time to raise that bar, a thousandfold.

It is therefore my pleasure to announce:

New 3D iPhone MMO in Development

A new MMO with the working title ‘Gryphon’ is currently in development. This MMO is being built from the ground up as a cross-platform MMO. This is not the “text and pictures” style game that is prevalent in the App Store now, but a full 3D real time online game: with everything you would expect from (yesterday’s) and today’s Massively Multiplayer Online games, and more.

• massive areas to explore
• pvp as well as pvm
• quests
• immersive and strategic combat
• brilliant spells and spell effects
• skill-based character system
• full array of stats and leveling to create a unique character
• online chat and emotes
• diverse crafting: perfect for casual play or long term play investment
• property ownership
• thousands of inventory items
• build your own section of the world and influence the main story
• unique gameplay elements [B]not found[/B] anywhere else
• staged releases, with new features being added with each new release

A key differentiator for Gryphon is that it is being developed from scratch with an iPhone client and casual gameplay in mind.  So, while you can play at home on your Mac or PC, you can also play using your iPhone using 3G or WiFi, your iPod Touch using WiFi, or even your favorite web browser!  There will be additional platforms developed in the future.  This cross-platform design will let you take the game as seriously as you want to, wherever you want to!

The development team is using a rapid prototype and development release cycle which will facilitate an organic growth model in response to user demands and overall story arc vision.  This means frequent releases and content updates focusing on key gameplay features in a manageable way, giving the players something new to look forward to each release.

Who is the team behind Gryphon?

They are a motley band of foolhardy gamers and Indie developers who have created a secret club and handshake to do something which moves quickly and sweepingly into your daily life. Small, but powerful. Like Yoda. If forced to answer the question “What is the game going to be like”, they might say something like this: “Our unofficial Gameplay Influences are games like Asheron’s Call and World of Warcraft, and the art team is heavily influenced by brands such as Lego, Dr Seuss, and the Muppets.. which are trademarked and copyrighted of their respective owners, of course.”

What is the Story of Gryphon?

Rumor has it that the design team has accidentally discovered an interdimensional window to a parallel universe and is focused on recording and making drawings of the things they see going on there, which serve as inspiration for the game. There’s no telling when the window will close, so this is a very busy time indeed!

One thing is clear. This story has never been told, and it’s going to take quite some time and many episodes to do it.

You..the player.. will have a part to play in it

Right now we are about at the point where we’re deciding what will go into the initial release and plotting out the map to get to initial release in early November. The World/Story Team and the Art Team are about formed up, and the Development Team is close behind.

He was born at 5:07PM EST. He’s been really quiet and he’s just a little cutie. I’ve been spending tons of time with the family, and my two-yr old daughter too, so that she isn’t so jealous

It’s very exciting to have another boy around!

CTM allows me to broadcast the requested target position of the player, and the code will set basically a navigation target marker. Then at your own leisure, you update the position of the target object until it is where it needs to be.

There is already a navigation pathfinding framework in Shiva which I tried to use. I’ve used it before for CastleGuard2, all the monster AI relied on it. Basically you build a level/map, and then you build a path node grid of navigation points. When you want to use it, you pick a target spot, ask the navigation system to tell you what the nearest navigation point is, and the system finds you the shortest path between those two points, using only the navigation grid. Then you move a navigation object along that path over time, and update your player to be near that navigation object to create a nice smooth transition. It works quite well.

Unfortunately it comes with a couple drawbacks. The first drawback is that you do have to build (manually) a navigation map for your entire level. That takes up memory (albeit probably not much) but could potentially be quite painstaking. I plan on having a free-roaming and possibly large game world, and some of it I wanted to procedurally generate. This means I can’t manually build nav meshes for every level.

One of the other drawbacks is the feel of it.  As a player, I want precise control, as precise as I can get it. When you use a nav pathfnding system to move a player character, he will always face in the direction of the nearest path marker he is journeying to. However, the path might not be in a straight line, even though there might not be any objects between you and your destination. That’s due to the granularity of the navigation mesh. It’s way too expensive to have navigation nodes everywhere, so you pick a granularity number, say 1 unit, and nodes are placed every 1 unit. However you don’t move (or turn) in values of 1 unit, unless you’re making Frogger. So the effect is crooked paths to represent the shortest point between A and B. This is fine for enemies, as they can use it to avoid obstacles and what have you, but bad for players.

So I took a chance and ditched the navigation pathfinding experiment, and rolled my own.  It works in a similar way in that a destination navigation target is set, and a navigation object is used also, which your player object updates itself towards in a smooth manner. The difference is that as soon as you place a new destination, your navigation object orients itself towards that destination object, and then moves FORWARD towards that navigation destination in a smooth manner.  It also will continue to point at the destination. The end result is that you turn and point in the direction you wanted to go to, and you walk towards it. Just like you would in real life. This means no strafing possibly (unless I combined the CTM system with a tiny bit of normal multiplayer movement).

I am quite happy with the result, and it feels *great* so far. A heck of a lot less clunky than the FPS style movement or dual sticks that everyone complains about on the iPhone, and always draws comparisons to the latest greatest dual stick mover.

Time to have some breakfast with the family, and then see what’s next

So I created a timer loop which sends out updates 10 times a second. On the other side, the remote client receives the update and interpolated the physics object attached to the player object and creates a smooth update. I tested it first with two players, then after figuring out how to use the interpolation and physics object to smooth things out, I turned sown the update frequency and tested with four players. Two web browsers, an iPod touch 2g, and my iPhone 3gs. It ran pretty smooth all around, but I have a nagging idea that just won’t go away…

If I were to use click-to-move gameplay, where the player clicks a spot on the ground and then moves towards it, I would *dramatically* cut down the net traffic. I’d also be transmitting rotation, but then the iDevices could handle many more players in a scene. I’m going with a crazy low poly count on the player model: 559 right now. It would be a tremendous competitive advantage if I did something no one else is doing and made it high capacity as well.

The real crucible is that the average gamer likes a certain style of player control. So CTM could be a nasty failure. I need a success. Well, as awkward as it may be, it is a magic dust to the game technology so I am going to begin thinking of it as a gameplay feature. Diablo was a CTM game.

So tomorrow I will prototype that concept and see how it pans out. While using traditonal multiplayer networking means I can’t even come close to the MMO moniker, CTM could very well help that to reality. The big prob with iPhone multiplayer is that it’s hard to find pol to play. Lots of games and casual gameplay needs make multiplayer a flash in the pan. I plan on countering that by going cross platform with the client, allowing web, mac, pc, iPhone. This should help ensure that players will be online to give the persistent world the life it needs.